But perhaps he did know that, or suspect it. Perhaps that was why she answered him, that she suspected a deeper question in that comment than most knew how to ask. He was shadow to her. She was shadow to him. They had no identity and every identity in Sanctuary, city of midnight meetings and constant struggle, constant connivance.
“I heal,” he said, low and in a voice that went to the bones. “That’s my curse.”
“I don’t need to,” she said in the same low murmur. “That’s mine.”
He said nothing for a moment. Perhaps he thought about it. Then: “I said that we would try them… yours and mine.”
She shivered. This was a man who walked through battlefields and blood, who was storm and gray to her utmost black and stillness; this was a man always surrounded by men, and cursed with too much love and too many wounds. And she had none of that. He was conflict personified, the light and the dark; and she settled so quickly back to stasis and cold, solitary.
“You missed your appointment,” she said. “But I never wait. And I don’t hold you to any agreement. That’s what I would have told you then. What I did, I did. For my reasons. Wisest if we don’t mix.”
And she turned and walked away from him. But the Tr6s started forward as if stung, and Tempus, shadowlike, circled to cut her off.
Another woman might have recoiled. She stood quite still. Perhaps he thought she could be bluffed, perhaps it was part of a dark game; but in his silence, she read another truth.
It was the challenge. It was the unsatisfiable woman. The man who (like too many others) partly feared her, feared failure, feared rejection; and whose godhood was put in question by her very existence.